Lately I have been trying to maximize the fun in having dual screen monitors, one being huge widescreen wallpaper and the other is watching a movie on not 1 but 2 monitors.

Even though I am savvy with computers it took me some google searching to find both of these solutions, if you have a similiar setup and curious what programs and settings were needed, check out the details after the jump.

To have Dual Screen Wallpaper:

1. Find some huge Wallpaper, you can easily google search “Dual Screen Wallpaper” or open up photoshop and create something pretty.

2. After that, you will need a program, Ultramon, this will force the windows to spread the wallpaper cross the two monitors perfectly.

(you might have notice I got different size monitors, they are both 19’ but one is wide and the other isn’t, and the image is perfectly fitted.)

Ultramon includes a lot of tweaks and goodies for managing a multi screen setup and one other big features in the taskbar they it automatically adds to your secondary screen.

Watch a movie across two or more screens:

The simplest solution is MatrixDVD, but sadly its old, outdated, and most importantly it has a huge ugly watermark on the corner.

My setup uses, VLC’s video wall filter:

(if you are not familiar with VLC, leave this article right now and download immediately, here)

to start the video wall filter go to Tools > Effects and Filters > Video Effects > Vout/Overlay

-Then check mark ‘Wall’ (my setup uses 1 row and 2 columns)

-This will separate the video equally in 2.

-If you own 2 of the same size monitor your job might be done here, if not like me, you are going to have to pay around with settings.  After making each section Full Screen, right click the video and pick Video > Aspect Ratio or Video > Crop, and play with the options there. (my setup uses no crop but has the Aspect Ratio set to 16:10)

*because my screens are not equal sizes, my setup is not flawless and I got to play positioning game with my monitors so from where I am sitting it looks perfect.

+I have choose to lose a bit of video just to give my eyes a rest, to make the overall picture look seamless despite the gap between the borders around my monitors.  I have positioned 1 of the monitors in front of other to slightly overlap the image.

Last Short Tip, Synergy:

I am not going to talk long about this one.  1. my main computer I use all the time is not this desktop but instead is a laptop that sits 2 feet away from this computer, I usually have both of them on at all times, and instead of consisting moving my butt to each spot to change something, I have installed Synergy.  Synergy simply allows you to share your keyboard and mouse across a network.  So I can simply drag my mouse to the other computer whenever I want, Great.

(I would recommend using the same Operating System on each computer, I had issues when I did Win 7 to Xp, but XP to XP and Win 7 to Win 7 works great.)